So there are many good reasons why the 7000 series is cool – the integrated flash devices, the hardware itself, blah, blah blah. Here’s the amazing part – the hardware isn’t even the coolest feature. It’s the software. The ability to *in real time* drop in new tracing events to see what’s really happening on the device is just unbelievable.

How many times have you seen your NAS devices suddenly “go slow”? And you have *no clue* as to why. I can tell you it happens often when running big infrastructure. You dig around for a while and maybe you can figure out that it’s one machine and if you’re particularly good you can figure out one user on one machine and slap their hands. With the 7000 you get the ability in real time to dig into whats being done using which protocol by user, by file, but whatever you want. It’s stunning to see, and incredibly useful in managing the infrastructure. For a mostly detailed overview of the capabilities, check out Bryan Cantrill’s presentation on analytics.

The SSDs are used explicitly for caching and logging, and only the 7410 offers both — the 7210 has read-biased SSDs, and the 7110 doesn’t have SSD support. In discussions with Sun engineers, they claimed that the addition of the read-biased SSD caching in conjunction with ZFS’ predictive caching algorithms means that 7200RPM SATA drives perform just as well, if not better than 10K SAS drives. In fact, they’re conducting trials to determine if they can use 4200RPM SATA drives in these devices without sacrificing I/O performance. If that’s possible, then the price point, power consumption, and heat generation drops across the board.

I’ll be looking for reviews with interest to see how these compare with similar NAS systems.